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I’m all signed up baby.
Here’s the info for the Thursday track day. http://speedsf.com/events-registration/
Note that it’s a 90dB day so you’ll need some kind of exhaust pipe muffler thing. A Supertrapp? I’ve never had to quiet my car down for a noise restricted track, so if you’ve questions about it, I’m not your guy.
I’m totally stoked about West Coast Champs at LAGUNA SECA! WOOHOO!
Nor Cal Racing Club will have a few events prior to Champs at Laguna. All will be 90 dB and there are no compromises at Laguna for sound. You get one warning and then you are finished for the day.
I have run with these guys and they have a good program.
Attention:
Anyone looking for a Rental or even Rent-To-Own for the WSC @ Laguna Seca?
I have 3 cars available with full support, feel free to contact me:
Ray 707.328.7709
info@sonomavalleyracing.com
[quote=“priapism” post=81137]Supertrapp won’t work. Ask me how I know…
https://vimeo.com/55022077[/quote]
Explain pls. I’m doing the Thur track day so need a noise reducer solution.
It sticks out too far, and drags in 8a.
I’ve seen solutions that are curved up or sideways, but nobody will give me a hint as to where they got it.
Here is what I use for that track. Slips over the existing Spec System. Quick to install and remove, also useful for late nights when you need to put the car in the trailer and you don’t want to piss off the neighbors!
All parts are purchased from Summit Racing and cost about 120.00 to buy and build.
Here is the entry list so far as of June 25th. Michael Shawhan was listed twice…so I assumed one of the two was for his Dad Bill…hope I’m correct 
1 Raymond Zanotto California- Northern Region
2 Sylas Montgomery California- Northern Region
3 Ethan Stone California- Northern Region
4 Michael Shawhan California- Northern Region
5 Sean Aron California- Southern Region
6 OM Shenanigans/Too Sukchai California- Southern Region
7 Val Ryabov California- Northern Region
8 Anthony Zwain California- Northern Region
9 Scott Gress Southeast Region
10 Michael Mihld California- Southern Region
11 Andrew Clark California- Southern Region
12 JoJo McKenzie California- Southern Region
13 Gary Rieger California- Northern Region
14 Bill Shawhan California- Northern Region
15 Ronald Swenson California- Northern Region
16 Scott Clough California- Northern Region
17 Nathan Walton California- Northern Region
18 A.R. Hoshmandy Southeast Region
19 Greg Peterson California- Northern Region
20 James Randolph California- Northern Region
21 Larry Fraser California- Northern Region
22 J.P. Cadoux California- Northern Region
23 Aristotle Balogh California- Northern Region
24 Larry Moore California- Northern Region
25 Brian Sien California- Northern Region
26 Natasha Balogh California- Northern Region
27 Bennett McMicking California- Northern Region
28 Andy Chittum California- Northern Region
29 Sean Quinlan California- Northern Region
30 Charles Buzzetti California- Southern Region
31 Steve Agoston California- Southern Region
32 Joseph Nagy California- Northern Region
33 Chris Donnelly California- Southern Region
34 Steven Stepanian California- Southern Region
For some of the testing I did, I just went out and found an old stock exhaust system. A little more difficult to change and carry around, but fits like it’s made for the car.
I had the sound booth there at Laguna measure the result - on a cool (low 70s) day it came out well under 90, just under 87b. Note as well that weather conditions can affect measurements by several db - cool and dry will seems to transmit sound better.
Live timing and race results will be published on RaceHero starting tomorrow AM:
In addition to running spece30.com, I created RaceHero, so if you have any questions, let me know. B) I’m hoping to make it down there Saturday or Sunday to say hi. Good luck everyone!
Brian
Updates and stories.Help us out here.(Here, literally.)
(Guess I should tune into facespace ?)
RP
I started 31st and finished 14th.
After running Friday’s qual race with the motor on 5 cylinders, and the #1 valve come completely apart in Saturday’s warmup, Mitchell at Offset worked his ass off late to put a new head on the car. It ran super strong. Not the result I’d hoped for, but I’m pretty happy with how I drove on Sunday. Had a great dice with the elder Shawhan for the last third of the race–great driving there, a pleasure to race that guy (even if he beat me, the fucker!) I spent a long time looking for a way by but he never put a foot wrong and defended just enough to keep me from getting around.
Unfortunately Buzzetti’s recent cap and rotor change put him a couple of HP over the limit, so he got DQ’d. Zanotto is protesting the winners in both races, so everything is “provisional” at the moment.
Can’t wait to see Sandro’s video.
No kidding!! I ended up watching this race from start/finish (I’m racing next year’s Championships for sure), and it was a blast to watch, even just being able to see a few turns. So many lead changes!!
That video should be fun to watch.
Som
The 4 days at Laguna Seca were so damn packed with new friends, fun and excitement that now, a day later, it’s all kinda a fog.
I bunked with Shawn Meze and Steve Stepenian. Geeze, what great guys. I was driving Shawn’s car for the event, my scheme to pack trucks with enthusiastic East Coast SpecE30’s having fallen apart for lack of enthusiastic East Coast SpecE30’s, lol. I did the Thur track day, thank god, and because I supersized to GTS, I got in 2 practice sessions Friday morning. So I had 6 sessions on the track before Qual which is obviously plenty of time to get the basic hang of a new track.
Shawn went to the time and expense to get custom CPT America decals for his car. In addition to headlight decals there was a huge one for the hood that had RANGER emblazoned on it. It…was…so…damned…cool.
Friday morning Sandro, Mark, Ryan, and AR arrived. It was great to see faces that I really knew, among all the new friends that I was struggling to keep track of. To my embarrassment, Mark got on the track and was immediately faster then I was. I mean, WTF, I had a track day here and he didn’t. I looked at my times and I was something awful like 9secs off of the leaders. I started worrying that I might be looking at one of those situations where you have to act like it doesn’t really matter to you that you’ve just been humiliated. Sure, I was on old tires, but I figured that was worth about 2 of those 9secs. I really wanted to be within 4secs of the leaders. I knew there was no way that I was going to be mid-pack, but I really didn’t want to be last.
I got faster. I put on stickers for Qual and the Qual Races, and pressed the comfort zone to build confidence in the fast corners and started running laps 3.5-4secs back. I was pretty pleased with that.
For the first Qual race I rolled over like a patsy going into turns. I hadn’t done any thinking about defensive lines yet, and it showed. I got wider in the 2nd Qual race and did a lot of grinning as a couple guys struggled to get by me on the course sections where they were better than I. If I could hold them off where I sucked, I could gap them where I sucked less. I got a little more aggressive in the 2nd comp races and got besides folks inside of some turns. They didn’t brook much of that foolishness tho and closed the door on my by swooping to the apex. I was determined to not have the slightest contact with Shawn’s car, so I tried to leave myself enough buffer in the pass attempts that I could escape unscathed if the passee defended aggressively.
The GTS Qual races were tricky. My rear view mirror kept moving out of place and the closure rate of the fast GTS cars was hellacious. I had to put a lot of attention on my mirrors, constantly adjusting the rearview, in order to predict when the fast GTS cars were going to go for the pass. All it would take is for there to be a pair of cars when I only saw one, and it could go poorly.
Both Thur and Fri nights we went into Monterey for chow. Much more high-end then the dives we tend to frequent for East Coast chow. Lots of seafood. It was totally awesome. Saturday night was the NASA banquet. It was really terrific. Tons of great chow and a stellar beer selection.
Sunday feature races. Well, this didn’t go quite as perfect. On Friday, Shawn and Steve’s mechanics, Mitchell and Tiny, noted that my shifter was loose. I’d noted that too, but it wasn’t my car so I just figured it was characteristic of the car and just one more variable to be dealt with. The car had a direct shifter, so no shift carrier, that is/was on a ebay and being sold by a dude in Eastern Europe. I’d contacted that guy a couple years ago and we talked about his shifter. I almost bought one back then, but ended up getting the AKG instead. Personally, I like the E. European shifter better because it’s not so short as the AKG shifter. Less short means less sensitive to being absolutely precise. IMO the AKG and BW direct shifters are too short.
The SpecE30 feature race was before the GTS feature race. I started, I dunno, something like 25 of 36, which I was proud of. I went and talked to Sean Parr, the guy who would be next to me, so that if we both got a good standing start we wouldn’t try to dive for the same hole. Mark, still faster than I, was starting right behind me. He’d been in a couple incidents where folks banged into him and that affected his start position. We had noted that our starts were consistently better then our back-maker grid neighbors so we hoped to make up several spots at the start.
Mark and I had a plan for our fabulous start. As as soon as the Green dropped I ignored the plan. I bolted for the outside, and I think Mark went with me. We passed prob 4 guys and headed for the turn 2 scrum. It didn’t take me long to start screwing up tho.
I have to hit 2nd gear at the turn before the front stretch. It’s the only place I’ve ever had to hit 2nd gear as a planned event. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t very good at it. In the 10-15min after my fabulous start, I screwed up that turn 2x and pissed away the positions earned. I was fighting my way back into the fray, noting with irritation that heatcycle 5 on the tires wasn’t nearly as fast as HC1-4 were. Then I approached my nemisis turn once again.
I hit the brakes hard going into the turn, started easing off pressure as the speed came down (no abs), and delayed the downshift to 2nd until the very last minute. Then just before turn-in, I went for the very unfamiliar 4-2 downshift and to my very great surprise the shifter rod became completely free.
With one hand waving the shifter around in the air, snapped at the tranny tunnel sheetmetal, my right arm still not really understanding WTF just happened, I did an immediate scan for an escape route. I was goddamned determined to get the car to a location where I wouldn’t affect the race. There was an access road to the right so, trying to hang on to my inertia, I headed that way. I just barely was able to turn the car hard right and move behind a wall. It was slightly uphill tho, so the car wanted to drift back to the track.
I had no ebrake and I couldn’t jump out of the car to find a tire chock while it rolled back on to the track. In the absence of a better idea, I opened the door, put the shift rod down on the road, and allowed the car to slowly roll back to the shift rod such that it would wedge the LF tire. Once done, I got out of the car and from behind the fence, I enjoyed a ring-side seat for the last 15min of the race.
Altho it might have been possible to install a new shifter, probably with a shifter carrier, in the limited time before the GTS race, Shawn’s mechanics Mitchell and Tiny had a bunch of other stuff to do, and pretty much all of it was “right now” stuff. I’d already had a total blast so I figured I’d already accomplished my mission and I could live with missing the GTS race. I didn’t want to put stress on folks just so I could do 1 more race. I’d already done 4.8 races over the last couple of days, so I was good.
To my very great relief, I kept Shawn’s car entirely free of contact. I did bust his shifter, of course. National events can be pretty aggressive. There can be bad luck like fluids, my nemesis. There were a couple bad incidents this weekend, and a number of lesser incidents that bent up sheetmetal. At one point, with about 0.25sec to make the right decision, I had to play dodge-the-bouncing-tire, a new entry in my list of calamity’s dodged.
This was the greatest race event ever. Total blast. It was awesome to do Laguna Seca, and it was awesome to meet the terrific West Coast guys, particularly my gracious hosts Shawn and Steve. When West Coast guys come out and do our events, us East Coast types need to go to great lengths to make sure that they have as much fun at our events, as they ensured that we did at their event.
Hey Ranger
I really enjoyed racing with you (I was in the blue/green #50 car) at laguna. I seemed to spend a lot of the weekend battling you, Mark, and AR. I particularly remember the second GTS race, where I spent the whole race trying to get past you and Mark. I finally got past you in T9, only to give it back in T11 a few seconds later! A good time.
I am still kicking myself for bumping into AR going side by side in the corkscrew in the SE30 championship race. Totally my fault and I ended up with a broken wheel stud, which caused the wheel to come loose so I had to come in. Luckily, it did not negatively affect AR’s race.
Glad you guys made the trip across the country. It was a great weekend.